LECTURE 
Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence)
Thursday, May 15 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

SEMINAR
Sentimentalism in Contemporary Chinese Cinema & Beyond
Friday, May 16 / 10AM –- 12PM / Humanities 210

Download a copy of the seminar reading.

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University where she teaches in Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. She is the author of Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minnesota, 1991); Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana, 1993); Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia, 1995); Ethics after Idealism: Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana, 1998); The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia, 2002); and, most recently, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Duke, 2006) and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (Columbia, 2007).

The lecture will be an examination of the complex role played by translation (in various forms) in mediating contemporary cultural politics, in particular the kinship translation shares with mourning, on the one hand, and with multiculturalism, on the other. The seminar will be based on the introduction (and possibly other chapters) of her latest book: it will be an exploration of some of the familiar trajectories of the sentimental in contemporary literary, film, and cultural studies, asking how such trajectories may carry different connotations in a global context.

Tuesday, May 13 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

Giovanni Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (Verso, 1994) and co-author, with B. J. Silver, of Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minnesota,1999). His latest book is Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2007).

Professor Arrighi focuses on the divergent developmental trajectories of East Asia and Southern Africa over the last thirty years. The basic hypothesis he is investigating is whether the divergence can be traced to a difference in historical legacies: a legacy of accumulation without dispossession in East Asia, and one of accumulation by extreme dispossession in Southern Africa.

For more information please contact Gopal Balakrishnan, gopalb@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Capitalisms and Anti-Capitalisms Research Cluster

Thursday, May 8 / 10 AM / Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room D (above the Bay Tree Bookstore)

Jorge Cocom Pech is a poet from the Maya Peninsula in Mexico. He is the former president of Escritores en Lenguas Indigenas (ELIAC). Cocom Pech’s poetry has appeared in various national and international magazines. He has received several awards for his poetry. He is the author of Mukul tan/Los Cuentos del abuelo.

For more information contact Renya Ramirez, renya@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Indigenous Studies Research Cluster

Thursday, April 24 / 4 PM / Humanities 1, Room 620

Poetry Reading
Thursday, April 24 / 6:30 – 7:30 PM
Felix Kulpa Gallery, 107 Elm Street, downtown Santa Cruz

Juliana Spahr is a poet, editor, and scholar. Her most recent book of poetry is This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (California, 2005), a collection of poems that she wrote from November 30, 2002 to March 30, 2003 that chronicled the buildup to the latest U.S. invasion of Iraq.  Atelos recently published The Transformation (2007), a book of prose that tells the story of three people who move between Hawai‘i and New York in order to talk about cultural geography, ecology, anticolonialism, queer theory, language politics, the academy, and recent wars.

For more information contact Andrea Quaid, aquaid@ucsc.edu or Jessica Beard, jbeard@ucsc.edu

Sponsored by the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster

College Eight, Room 301

This Spring, the Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster will host a series of seminars featuring prominent feminists who have written about or worked within the fields of pornography and erotica. Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright, Carol Leigh, Ann Simonton, and Diana Russell work with, celebrate, and are critical of pornography and erotica in very different ways. They represent classic voices in the feminist pornography debates of the 1980s and 1990s although they hail from opposing factions of this contentious exchange.

Friday, April 18, 3:30-5:30pm

Ann Simonton is a writer, lecturer, and activist in anti-pornography feminism. More than twenty years ago, she founded Media Watch, a non-profit group that advocates against sexism and racism in media of all kinds. Simonton’s lectures and her work with Media Watch have helped to educate the public about feminism and to foster media literacy and critical consumerism.

Friday, May 2, 3:30-5:30pm *Advance registration is recommended

Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., is an author, artist, and sexologist as well as a former pornography performer and sex worker. She was a pivotal figure in the feminist sex-positive movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Currently, Dr. Sprinkle lectures widely as a sex educator. Her books include Post Porn Modernist and the award-winning Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance.

Carol Leigh (aka Scarlot Harlot) is a sex worker, artist, and activist who has been prominent in national and international sex work debates since the 1970s. Leigh is also a co-founder of BAY SWAN, Bay Area Sex Workers Advocacy Network, which organized sex worker rights advocates employed as outreach workers at various agencies. She has also been a spokeswoman for the sex workers’ rights organization COYOTE.

Friday, May 16, 3:30-5:30pm

Susie Bright is a sex educator and erotica author known as a pioneer of the sex-positive movement. She was co-founder and editor of the women’s sex magazine, On Our Backs, and currently hosts the weekly audio show, In Bed With Susie Bright.  Her books include Mommy’s Little Girl: Susie Bright on Sex, Motherhood, Pornography, and Cherry Pie and Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sex and Creativity. Bright taught the first university class on the aesthetics and politics of pornography at the California Institute of the Arts in 1986, and she has taught courses on sexual representation at UCSC. Bright was the first female critic of the X-Rated Critics Organization in 1986; she wrote feminist reviews of erotic films for Penthouse Forum from 1986 to 1989.

Friday, May 30, 3:30-5:30pm

Diana Russell, Ph.D., is a renowned scholar and activist who has dedicated her life to combating violence against women and girls. She has written extensively on pornography as a cause of rape and sexual victimization and has been a central figure in anti-pornography feminism for decades. Her books include The Epidemic of Rape and Child Sexual Abuse in the United States; The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women; Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny, and Rape; Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm; and Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography.

Dr. Russell’s Political CV

Reading – “Pornography as a Cause of Rape”

Reading – “Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization”

We will read the books, articles, films, and other work produced by our speakers and will invite them to converse with us about their experiences of activism and scholarship as feminists working with, in, and against different pornographies. Contact Natalie Purcell at npurcell@ucsc.edu to join the Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster or to obtain more information about our Spring Speaker Series.

*We anticipate a large turnout for our May 2nd event, and space will be limited. Advance registration is recommended. Unregistered and/or late guests will not be admitted if space does not permit. E-mail npurcell@ucsc.edu to register.

Sponsored by the Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster

Saturday, April 5th

Conference: 1 – 4 PM, Humanities 210
Activism Roundtable/Dinner: 5 – 6:30 PM, Stevenson Events Center
Performances: 7 – 9 PM, Stevenson Events Center
Poetry Readings: April 9, 16, & 23

The cluster brings together emerging scholars, artists, and activists whose work addresses current state violence and political repression in the Philippines, aiming to create an opportunity for community dialogue around politically engaged Filipino/a American cultural production and related political organizing. The conference on April 5 will consist of two academic panels, an activism roundtable involving community organizations around the Bay Area, an evening of performances including Aimee Suzara, Lani Montreal, People Power of UCSC’s Filipino Student Association, and a screening of a documentary by Eric Tandoc, a student in UCSC’s Social Documentation program. The event will continue through the month of April with poetry readings by R. Zamora Linmark, Shirley Ancheta, Jeff Tagami, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Juliana Spahr.

Co-sponsorship provided by Oakes College, Merrill College, Stevenson College, Cowell College, Kresge College, Colleges 9 and 10, and the departments of Sociology, Literature, HAVC, and History of Consciousness, as well as the Living Writers Series, the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and the Center for Justice, Tolerance & Community.

Thursday, April 3 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

Peggy Kamuf is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.  Her principal publications are Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Nebraska, 1982); Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Cornell, 1988); The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago, 1997); and Book of Addresses (Stanford, 2005), which won the René C. Wellek Prize for Literary and Cultural Theory from the American Comparative Literature Association. She has translated numerous works by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hélène Cixous, and has edited several collections of essays by Derrida: A Derrida Reader (Columbia, 1991), Without Alibi (Stanford, 2002), and most recently, with Elizabeth Rottenberg, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 vols. (Stanford, 2007, 2008).

Professor Kamuf’s current projects include an essay for the relaunch of The Oxford Literary Review; a Festschrift essay for Rodolphe Gasché; the translation of Cixous’s Si près; the editing and translating of forty years of Derrida’s unpublished seminars; and a book on “strategic culture.”

LECTURE

Transparent Biology: A Cultural Account
Thursday, March 13 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

In this presentation Sarah Franklin considers the recent debates about the remaking of genealogy and inheritance that recompose national and global politics at the level of cellular action. Her past work on IVF, cloning, and stem cells brings together feminist theory, cultural and science studies, with fieldwork in laboratories and clinics where push comes to shove in the vague but oddly certain contexts of decision-making that drive forward imaginaries of hope, progress, and renewal. Against the history of the “frontier” on which so many of these visions are sown, lies a complex topography of interests and investments that might be described as biocapital.

SEMINAR
After Dolly
Friday, March 14 / 10 AM – 12 PM / Humanities 210

Download seminar reading #1

Download seminar reading #2

In this seminar Sarah Franklin will discuss her work on Dolly the sheep and the aftermath of the Roslin series of experiments into transgenesis using the example of iPS, or induced pluripotent stem cells. This seminar will also provide the occasion to review some of the political differences between US and UK policy toward stem cell research, with a look back at what feminist science studies has had to say about the embryo and fetus.

Sarah Franklin has written, edited, and co-edited 15 books on reproductive and genetic technologies, as well as more than 70 articles, chapters, and reports. Her work combines traditional anthropological approaches, including both ethnographic methods and kinship theory, with more recent approaches from science studies, gender theory, and cultural studies. In 2004 she moved to the London School of Economics, to a chair created for her in the Department of Sociology and linked to the BIOS Centre. In 2007, Professor Franklin was awarded an ESRC senior research fellowship to consolidate a number of themes in her recent research under the heading “The IVF-Stem Cell Interface: A Sociology of Embryo Transfer.” She is co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception (Manchester, 1993, repr. Routledge, 1999), and Global Nature, Global Culture (Sage, 2000), among others. Her most recent book is Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Duke, 2007).

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Sociology and History of Consciousness, with additional funds provided by Feminist Studies, Literature, the Genomics and Justice Working Group, and the Institute for Humanities Research.

Wednesday, March 12 / 12 PM / Humanities 210

Graduate Student Seminar
Thursday, March 13 / 2 – 3:45 PM / College Eight, Rm 201

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College. Before coming to Goldsmiths in 2004, she was based in Women’s Studies at Lancaster University for 10 years. She works at the intersection of feminist theory, critical race studies, postcolonial theory and queer studies. Her publications include: Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge, 1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, 2004) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke, 2006). She is currently writing a book, The Promise of Happiness, for Duke University Press, as well as a collection of essays on racism, diversity, and language. 

The Promise of Happiness explores how happiness works as a promise that directs us towards certain objects, as if they could provide the necessary ingredients for a good life. Ahmed poses the questions: who is seen to bring happiness to whom? How do bad feelings get converted into good ones? Who promises to overcome unhappiness, and what does it mean for some to be seen as the bearers of this promise? She will investigate how feminist, queer and anti-racist politics work by exposing the “unhappy effects” of the promise of happiness. She will consider how various figures, as “affect aliens” (the feminist kill-joy, the unhappy queer, the melancholic migrant, and the angry black woman), may offer us an alternative social promise as embodiments of the struggle for a bearable life.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Sociology and History of Consciousness, with additional funds provided by Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Literature, and the Institute for Humanities Research.

Tuesday, March 11 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

Nicola Griffith, whose novels include Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), and Always (2007), is a genre-bending author, native of Yorkshire, activist, and recipient of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. She has also authored myriad works of non-fiction, including a memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life (Payseur & Schmidt, 2007), which takes the form of a multi-media box and has been described by Gary Wolfe as “a do-it-yourself Nicola Griffith home assembly kit.” Griffith’s novels focus on issues that cross and disarticulate the boundaries of “lesbian” and “woman,” as well as “science fiction” and “crime fiction”; their concerns foreground disparate nodes of connection and disconnection: “the world, the body, and how the two interact; the nature of self, the notion of forgiveness and change; physical joy; biological, cultural, and psychological systems, and so on.” Her talk will consist of a short reading of new work, a speculative and interactive reading of what she terms her “hynogogic” writing, audience questions, her questions, and her answers.

For more information contact Mary Weaver, mweaver@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster